Wiring, Nets & Buses

Wires are how you connect the holes, rails, and terminals you've already populated with boards and parts into a working circuit. Chip Hippo's wire tool is click-click (no drag-to-draw), every wire remembers the two addresses it connects rather than raw screen positions, and a bus lets you lay a whole marching group of wires — a data or address bus — as one gesture. This page covers the wire tool, colors, cross-board wiring, re-routing and deleting a wire, addresses, and buses.

A chip wired to switches, power rails and LED read-outs

The wire tool

Press W (or click Wire in the toolbar) to arm the wire tool. With the tool armed:

Click a free hole or terminal to anchor the first end — a rubber-band preview then tracks your cursor.
Click a second free point to drop the wire between them.

The tool stays armed after a wire is committed, so you can lay a whole chain of wires without re-arming — each new wire starts fresh, so it does not automatically continue from the last endpoint; just click a new starting hole. A hover ring shows the point under your cursor and turns red the moment it's over an illegal target (already occupied, or the same point you started from) — the rubber band tints red too, so a bad landing is obvious before you click.

Press Esc to cancel a pending (anchored-but-not-yet-dropped) wire without leaving the tool, or Esc/click Wire again to disarm it entirely. M also disarms whichever of the wire, bus, or probe tools is currently armed — one key to "put the tools away." The wire tool (like the bus and placement tools) is unavailable while a simulation is running; editing is locked until you press Stop.

Wire colors

Chip Hippo ships eight wire colors: red, black, blue, green, yellow, orange, white, and purple. The active color is shown as a swatch dot on the toolbar's Wire button — click the dot itself to open the palette and pick a different one (picking a color sets it without arming the tool, so you can set up a color before you start wiring). Clicking the word Wire beside it still arms the tool as usual. While the tool is armed you can also press a digit 1–8 to jump straight to a color (1 = red, 2 = black, and so on through the list above). The color you pick stays pinned between wires — laying a chain of jumpers keeps whatever color you last chose, so pick red for a supply run and black for ground and they'll stay that way until you deliberately switch.

You can also recolor a wire after the fact: right-click it and choose Properties…, which offers the same eight swatches alongside the wire's name, description, layout method, and the drawing of the wire itself described below. (Delete Component on that menu is how a wire is removed.)

Wire length

The last thing in a wire's Properties… dialog isn't a field at all — it's a picture of the wire, drawn across the card in its own colour with the sleeve stripped back at both ends to bare tinned lead, and a dimensioned line underneath giving its length in centimetres.

It answers the one question the desk can't. On the desk a wire is a curve between two holes at whatever zoom you're at, so its length is unreadable — and its length is exactly what you need before cutting one off a spool.

Two things about that figure:

It's the cut length, not the run. A real jumper doesn't stop at the surface of the board — it has to reach into both holes — so a wire crossing a single 0.1 in pitch is about 13 mm of wire, not 3. The sleeve in the drawing spans the run; the bare tips are the two stripped ends; the dimension spans the lot.
The length follows the drawn shape, not the straight-line distance: the sagging curve's own arc for a direct wire, the polyline through the waypoints for a routed one, and for a bus member its lead plus the whole ribbon plus its far lead — a conductor inside a ribbon cable is as long as the cable, however short the ends sticking out of it are.

It's the same measurement, and the same wording, as the Wires cutting list in the build guide — so a wire can't read one length here and another there. Recolor the wire in this same dialog and the drawing repaints to match.

Cross-board wires

A wire's endpoints don't care which board or brick they land on — you can run a wire from one breadboard to another, from a board to a PSU terminal, or between two separate strips, exactly as freely as within one board. When you drag a board that a wire is attached to, the wire's other end stays put and the whole wire stretches and re-sags live, riding the move; nothing needs to be re-laid. Deleting a board cascades: any wire with an end seated on that board is removed along with it.

Moving a part is different, because a part's pins can land somewhere its wires can't follow: an ordinary part drag leaves every wire in the hole you laid it in, which on a wired part quietly rewires the circuit. Hold Option as you press and the wire ends plugged into it come along instead — for one part, or for a whole selection of them. See Chips & Components for the rules, and for what the Option-held preview rings show you before you commit.

Re-routing & deleting a wire

Grab a wire two different ways:

Its end cap — drag just one endpoint to a new hole or terminal, re-routing that end while the other stays put. A hover ring and red/legal tint on the dragged end work exactly like placing a fresh wire; release over an illegal point and the end snaps back to where it started.
Its body — drag anywhere along the wire itself to translate the whole wire rigidly, keeping its length and orientation and just sliding both ends together onto a new pair of holes. If either landing point isn't free, the wire snaps back on release.

To delete a wire, click it to select it, then press Delete or Backspace (the same shortcut removes whatever's currently selected — a part, a board, or a wire).

Wire layout: direct or routed

Every wire is drawn one of two ways, its Layout Method — right-click a wire and choose Properties… to switch it:

Direct (the default) — the wire sags gently from one hole to the other, the way a real jumper lead does. There is nothing to position: the shape follows the two ends.
Routed — the wire runs as straight lines, and you decide where it goes. This is the one to reach for when a run would otherwise cross the middle of a chip, or when a tidy right-angled layout reads better than a fan of curves.

A routed wire starts as a single straight line. To bend it:

Press anywhere along the wire and drag. A new point is added where you grabbed it, and the wire now runs start → point → end. Repeat to take it around whatever is in the way — up to twenty points per wire.
Hover an existing point and its knob appears; drag it to move that bend somewhere else.
Drop a point onto a neighbouring point, or onto either end of the wire, and it merges away — that's how you take a bend back out. The point you are dragging turns red as it lands, so you can see the merge before you release.
Drop an end cap onto one of the wire's own points and that point is absorbed: the wire now reaches where the bend used to be, so the bend has nothing left to do.

Because a routed wire's body drag is spoken for, it has no rigid whole-wire translate — move it by its end caps instead. Switching a wire back to Direct deletes every point it carried and redraws it as the plain sagging curve; switching to Routed straightens it out, ready for points. Either way it's one undo step (Cmd/Ctrl+Z), as is every individual bend.

Settings ▸ Appearance ▸ Wire layout picks which of the two a newly laid wire gets. It's read when the wire is laid, so changing it never disturbs wiring already on the desk. Circuits built by the AI builder always arrive direct, whatever that setting says — the builder places holes, not hand-drawn routes.

Addresses

Wires never store pixel positions — they store addresses, the one cross-module currency for anything wireable. An address is <ownerId>.<point>:

bb1.a12 — a grid hole (board id bb1, hole a12).
bb2.+7 — hole 7 on a rail strip's + rail.
psu1.+ — the + terminal of a PSU brick.

A wire's from/to are just two of these addresses, plus a color. One hole or terminal holds at most one lead — one pin or one wire end — so the occupancy check that keeps the wire tool's hover ring legal/illegal is the same one that governs seating a chip or a discrete. Because everything resolves through addresses rather than coordinates, a wire keeps working correctly no matter how the boards around it get rearranged.

Buses

For a wide, tidy bundle — a data or address bus — press B (or click Bus in the toolbar) to arm the bus tool instead of laying eight wires by hand. It's click-click like the wire tool: anchor a start hole, then click a second point to lay the whole run in one go, rendered as a single fat band rather than a fan of individual wires.

Before you click, set the width. The circled number on the toolbar's Bus button shows the active one, and clicking it opens the presets in a row: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 16 bits, the current one ringed. Picking one sets the width without arming the tool, so you can set up before you start. From the keyboard — while the bus tool is armed — 2–8 lay a bus that many bits wide (4 → D[3:0]) and 1 lays the 16-bit bus (D[15:0]); no single digit can spell 16, and the widest bus is worth the first key. The width names the bus too (D[3:0]); rename a placed one from its context menu.

Landing the second click on a chip pin group (a catalog-defined bus of pins, like a chip's data lines) fans the bus onto those pins in bit order, instead of marching it down a second run.

Both ends have to fit. A bus claims one hole per bit at each end, so as you move the cursor every hole it would take is ringed — in the hover color when they're all free and on the strip, in red when they're not, and a red set can't be clicked. Aim an 8-bit bus five columns from the end of a board and you'll see five red rings instead of eight, which is the whole explanation: the run doesn't fit there. That check runs on the first click as well, so a start that could never work is refused where you make it rather than looking like the far end is at fault.

A bus is metadata layered over the individual wires it lays — right-click a placed bus to Rename, Recolor (which recolors every member wire too), Un-bundle (keep the wires, drop the bus grouping), or **Delete bus

wires**. Drag a bus by its band to move every member wire together.